Chapter Thirty-Seven Talia
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Talia
It takes a few minutes, but eventually, the hospital room comes into focus around her, and Talia realizes why she cannot move her arms: She is handcuffed to the bed.
Carefully, she tests the limits of her cuffs, tugging her left arm, and then her right.
Pain radiates from her wrists, rubbed raw from friction, but it doesn’t eclipse the throbbing of her left shin.
You need something to drink, her brain informs her.
You need something to drink, and you need to stay calm.
“Water,” she cries out for a second time. “I need water.”
The uniformed officer standing outside her door doesn’t turn to look at her—and in fact, he starts to walk away.
“Come back.” Talia’s throat throbs with the effort of yelling, her command coming out as little more than a squeak.
Her heart sinks when the officer rounds the corner, leaving her sight, but just as quickly, he returns with a nurse in tow. Wordlessly, the two enter the room.
“Could I get some water, please?” she tries again.
The nurse doesn’t respond, avoiding Talia’s eyes as she switches out her IV bag.
“Are you able to take off these cuffs? They’re really uncomfortable.”
Still no response. Talia turns to the officer—a lanky, curly-haired guy who looks no older than twenty—standing solemnly in the corner of the room.
“There’s no reason for me to be restrained. I didn’t do anything.”
The officer’s eyes meet hers for just a moment before he snaps his focus out the window again.
The nurse peels back the dressing wrapped around her shin, and for the first time, Talia sees the bullet hole, gaping and oozing like something from a horror movie. Without warning, two gloved thumbs press into the wound, and Talia rears back, nearly blacking out from the pain.
“Ow!”
“Sorry,” the nurse says, not sounding sorry at all.
She doesn’t understand why she’s being treated like this. She was just shot. She is a victim. Again, Talia tries appealing to the officer. “I need to know: Is Meera dead? And where is my fiancé?”
“Detectives Burrows and Harris will be here soon,” he says, addressing the wall behind her. “They will speak to you.”
Fuming, Talia lies in silence and allows the nurse to take her vitals until, at last, Burrows and Harris enter the room. Harris nods to the younger officer, and he and the nurse shuffle out of the room, leaving the two officers at the foot of the bed and Talia chained and vulnerable before them.
She asks again. “Please, can you tell me if Meera Ratnam is dead? You know what she’s capable of, and you know I’m not safe if she’s still alive. I mean, look at what she did. She shot me.” Talia attempts to gesture to her leg before remembering she can’t move her arms.
Harris pulls two chairs up to the side of the bed, and she and Burrows sit. “We’ll get to that,” she says. “First, I’d like to ask you about Malcolm Gray.”
Talia feels lightheaded. She wonders what that nurse put in her IV bag. “What about him?”
“You went to high school with him, yes?”
“And college. He was my boyfriend. But what does—?”
“Did you know his wife, Clara Belle Linhart? She met Malcolm at Auburn University, yes?”
Annoyance creeps in. Do these detectives not understand what she’s just been through? Can they not see that she needs to rest? “You’re asking questions,” Talia says, “but it feels like you already know the answers. What is the point of all this?”
“Three years ago, Malcolm and Clara Belle’s home in Opelika was burglarized. Clara Belle was bludgeoned to death, and Malcolm was left with a traumatic brain injury. He still hasn’t regained speech.”
“I remember hearing about that. It was very upsetting.”
Harris continues as though Talia hasn’t spoken.
“Police never found their suspect, and the attack was ruled random. However, Malcolm’s parents have their theories, mostly having to do with a woman named Natalia Danvers who had a crush on him in high school and followed him to college.
” She nods at Talia. “That’s you, correct? ”
“I didn’t follow him to college. He was my boyfriend. We were in love, and we agreed to go to college together.”
“That’s not how Mr. and Mrs. Gray seem to remember it.”
“They’re lying. They never liked me.” Talia tries to sit up, and her chafed wrists scream in protest. “Could I please get these cuffs removed?”
“In the five years that passed between Malcolm’s graduation at Auburn—when he first started dating Clara Belle to the night of the home invasion—Malcolm’s parents say he received hundreds of emails and messages and texts from you.
They say he only neglected to get a restraining order because he felt bad for you. ”
“Well, we dated for years. It would be weird if we simply stopped talking.”
“Okay,” Harris says, “but is it true that you moved to Austin right after Malcolm’s accident three years ago? That you legally changed your name to Talia, cut off ties with your family, and started a new life?”
“I wanted a fresh start. Is that a crime?”
“No.” Burrows’s mouth twitches, as though he’s tempted to smirk. “But it was a crime to kill Clara Belle Linhart and to nearly kill Malcolm Gray. And it was a crime to murder Amanda Reade three years later.”
No. No, no, no. This can’t be happening.
The words spill out of Talia’s mouth faster than she can even form them.
“Clara Belle was killed in a random burglary gone wrong,” she insists.
“And Amanda disappeared. No one knows what happened to her. She was unwell. She stole my boyfriend. She harassed me for months.”
“I think you’ve been telling yourself these stories for so long that you actually think they’re the truth.”
“I’m telling the truth. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Burrows gives Harris a subtle nod, and the two stand. “We’ll continue this later,” he tells Talia. “Why don’t you get some rest?”
“How am I supposed to rest while I’m chained up like this?” Talia asks, but she doesn’t get a reply. The door swings shut behind the detectives, and once again, she is alone.
Her head spins. Her wrists throb. The silence is oppressive.
All Talia wants is for Townsend to come into her room and wake her from her nightmare.
Willing herself elsewhere, she closes her eyes, and she must nod off, because the next thing she knows, someone is pulling back the curtain around her bed.
Townsend, she thinks. He came for me.
But when she opens her eyes, it’s not Townsend who stands at the foot of her bed but Meera, looking positively murderous.
A scream erupts from deep in Talia’s belly, so raw and feral it threatens to split her throat in two. “Guards! Help!”
Meera rears back, horrified. “Talia, please—”
“Someone help me! This woman tried to kill me!”
“Please, Talia.” Meera takes a tentative seat next to her bed, letting out a small groan as she does so. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Talia takes a deep breath, tempted to release a fresh round of screams, but what is the point? No one is coming to help her. No one here believes her. “What do you want, then?”
“I just want to talk to you. I just want to know why you did this to me.”
Here Talia is chained to a hospital bed with a hole in her leg, and Meera still wants to throw a pity party. “What do you think I’ve done to you, Meera?”
“Well, for starters”—Meera pulls aside her own hospital gown, showing a bloodied bandage on her hip—“you fucking shot me.”
“In self-protection.”
Meera stares at her for a beat too long. “Do you really believe that?”
“You broke into Townsend’s condo to hurt me. Maybe even to kill me. So yes, I do believe I was protecting myself.”
Still Meera continues to stare. “Oh, my God. You’ve convinced yourself that it was all real, haven’t you? In your twisted mind, you actually believe I posed as Amanda and sent all those messages and threats just to screw with your relationship.”
None of Meera’s words are making sense. “Amanda did send those messages.”
“Amanda is dead,” Meera snaps, “and you know that. What I want to know is when you decided to frame me for her supposed crimes.”
“I don’t. I didn’t.” There must be drugs in this IV bag. Something malicious is running through her veins, muddling her thoughts. They want to confuse her.
Meera continues, undeterred. “I trusted you more than anyone, and you betrayed me in the worst kind of way. You cost me my livelihood and my daughter. What did I do to deserve that?”
Is Amanda the real stalker, or is it Meera? Talia can’t keep track anymore. Either way, Meera is frightening her. If only Townsend would appear and make her go away.
As though reading her mind, Meera says, “I just don’t understand why you would do all of this for Townsend. You caused so many people so much grief, and for what? For a guy who cheated on you?”
Pain shoots through her limbs, stinging worse than when the nurse pressed down on her wound. “He’s changed. He loves me. Amanda meant nothing to him, and he regrets what he did to me every day.”
“Then why did you feel the need to kill her?”
Blood pumps so loudly in Talia’s ears that she can barely hear her own response: “Because she almost ruined everything.”
That’s when everything goes black. Did she have a stroke? Did Meera kill her? Shivering, Talia clenches her hands into fists and squeezes her eyes shut, praying for that glorious moment when she’ll wake up in Townsend’s bed, having realized this was all a bad dream.
But then: the squeak of shoes on linoleum. Someone new has entered the room. No, two somebodies. “You have the right to remain silent,” a voice says. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk to a lawyer for advice . . .”
Still Talia doesn’t open her eyes. To open them would be to acknowledge what’s happening, and she’s not ready to do that. Instead, she mutters to herself the few things she knows to be true, as though the words will absolve her and make this all go away:
I had to do it. I had to do it for Townsend. It would be like she never existed. We could be happy. I deserved to be happy.
I had to do it.